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By the midpoint of the semester, you will already have established a working relationship with your mentor. With your mentor's advice, you will have decided on a focus for your proposal. You will have collected references of work related to that focus. You will have determined a key research article that will illuminate your proposal, and you will soon write a summary of an experiment from that article.
It is time to organize your proposal, deciding on its main features.
To make this exercise as straightforward as possible, I've provided an outline of issues you should address. Feel free to copy and paste it into the proposal description that you submit.
Meta-information
- What is the working title of your proposal?
- Who is your mentor? Are you working with anyone else from your mentor's group? If so, who?
- What advice or support has your mentor provided?
Introduction
- What is the general, large issue you are addressing through your proposal? This question should be one that might engage a general audience of your peers. An example might be something like "What regulatory systems control the spread of non-cancerous cells?"
- What is the specific, small question are you addressing through your proposal? This question should be answerable by the experiment you will propose. An example might be something like "Does P53 protein bind to DNA upstream from the gene determining microRNA MiR-145 in cultured cell lines?"
- In brief, what is the connection between the large issue and the small question?
- Provide a reference to at least one article that could help you make that logical connection, and for each article cited, briefly describe the experiment from that article that is pertinent.
Experiment
- What do you need to measure in order to address the small question you will address?
- What kind of technique is available to make that measurement? At this point, you may not understand the technique, but you should have one or more examples in the literature of authors using some pertinent technique. Provide those references.
- What kind of result do you hope to obtain? Provide two possible results (not conclusions) and for each result, at least two possible interpretations, as different from each other as you can manage.
- What are some uncontrolled factors in your experiment that might affect its results? How?
Holes to fill
- What holes in your knowledge do you need to fill before completing the proposal?
- How do you think you can fill those holes?
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